A Wild Horse on the Comeback Trail

Claudia Feh has reintroduced the Przewalski horse, long extinct in the wild, to Mongolia, where it once thrived.

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Claudia Feh's fascination with Przewalskis led her to build and raise a herd in France. In two phases, the horses were eventually reestablished in Mongolia, where they had been extinct for several decades.

Photograph by Heine Pedersen, Rolex Awards

PUBLISHED November 17, 2016

The last surviving subspecies of undomesticated horse, extinct in the wild for nearly 50 years, is making a slow recovery in Mongolia.

The comeback of the Przewalski—regarded as the last of the truly wild horse species—is due largely to the dogged determination of Claudia Feh. For the past quarter-century, the Swiss environmentalist has led efforts to reestablish Przewalskis on the Mongolian steppe, where they once thrived.

Flying Endangered Wild Horses From France to Mongolia

The Przewalski (pronounced shuh-Val-skee) has been around for more than 100,000 years. But the squat, stubby-legged horse was little known outside of Eurasia until the 15th century and wasn't widely known by its current name until it was popularized in the 1880s by Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky.

Too wild to be domesticated—in captivity, Przewalski stallions were aggressive, often fought each other, and killed foals—their numbers were decimated by habitat loss and hunters by the early 1900s. By 1950, they were mostly found in zoos. Scientists believe the last Przewalski in the wild was gone by the 1960s.

Feh, a Rolex Laureate, began plotting their comeback in the wild in the early 1990s, building a small herd in southern France using 11 genetically compatible Przewalskis acquired from European zoos. Contrary to expert opinion, she allowed them to live together freely, mate naturally, and form their own social groupings.

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Considered too wild to be tamed, the Przewalski was never domesticated.

Photograph by Heine Pedersen, Rolex Awards

By September 2004, Feh felt comfortable enough with their social and free-range behavior to begin airlifting them to Mongolia. They were settled in Khomyn Tal, a remote region of western Mongolia near Khar Us Nuur National Park that’s bounded by lakes, rivers, and sand dunes.

Feh was inspired to study wild horses as a teen, when she saw 17,000-year-old paintings of Przewalski’s horses in France’s Lascaux Caves. She eventually became an expert on free-roaming breeds. “I wasn’t just impressed with the beauty of the horses but [also with] all the other animals that existed at the same time in our world that have now disappeared,’’ Feh says. “That just touched me.”

“What we’re trying to do is save a species,’’ Feh says. “This is a start, not the end, of the project.”

National Geographic produced this content as part of a partnership with the Rolex Awards for Enterprise. Feh and other explorers will be featured on the Rolex Awards for Enterprise 40th Anniversary program airing on the National Geographic Channel on Friday, November 18, at 7:30 p.m. ET/6:30 CT.